The Understatement of the Year (10 page)

“I’m not expecting you to stick up for me,” I added quickly. “Just chill the fuck out. Can you do that?”

His nod was slow. But it was serious.

There was a knock on the door. “Rikker? Graham?” Bella’s voice called.

“Yeah?” we both replied at once.

She twisted the lever. “It’s locked, morons.”

Graham got up quickly, his long legs eating up the distance to the door in just a few strides. When he opened the door, Bella came in, her glance traveling the quiet room, as if taking our temperature. “Whatcha doing?” she asked.

“Heroin,” Graham said. “With a side of meth, and a vodka chaser.”

For the first time in over five years, I laughed at one of Graham’s dry jokes.

Bella looked from him to me and back again. “Okay then. I was just checking to make sure that everyone is in for the night.”

“You can check us off,” I said. I got up off the bed and picked up my duffel, rummaging inside for flannel pants and my toothbrush.

As I passed Bella on the way into the bathroom, she said, “Hey, Graham, did Rikker tell you that you
were
on the same team for part of high school?”

“We, uh, covered that,” he said.

Standing at the sink, I brushed my teeth. Thanks to the mirror, I could see Bella reach up to cup Graham’s face in two hands. She rose up on her tiptoes and brought her mouth over his.

With my toe, I kicked the door shut behind me. But because the doors in cheap hotel rooms are made with all the sturdiness of a rice cracker, I heard Graham’s comment a long minute later, while I was pulling up my sleep pants. “That was nice and everything, Bella. But did I pass your Breathalyzer test?”

“Maybe that’s not why I kissed you,” she snapped.

“The hell it isn’t.”

Her voice got tight. “You’re right. I don’t like you at all.”

“Night, Bella.”

“Night, moron.”

I waited until I heard the hotel room door close before I came out again. Both beds were untouched, so I chose the nearest one without asking whether Graham had a preference. He and I did not need to have
any
conversations with the word “bed” in them. Pulling back the bedspread, I climbed in, rolling to put my back to him. It was body language that tried to say,
Nope! No awkwardness here.

Graham spent a few minutes in the bathroom, too. “You want this shut off, right?” he asked. I turned to find him standing by the lamp, fully dressed, including his hockey jacket and shoes.

“Yeah,” I answered.

He clicked off the light. “I’m going for a walk,” he said, his voice low.

“Okay?” That was against curfew, but I wasn’t going to argue with him.

“I just need, you know, head space.”

Pushing up on one elbow, I asked, “Do you still sleep like shit?” Since I’d known him, he was a terrible sleeper. The only middle school insomniac I’d ever met.

“Yup.” Absently, he reached a hand up to probe the back of his head, where it had hit the wall before.

“Shit. I’m sorry about your head.”

He gave his chin a shake, as if warding off my apology. “All our previous shit is covered under the treaty, no?”

That made me smile, and for a second his expression softened. But then he shut it down, turning away from me. He flicked off the bathroom light. Then, without another word, he opened the door and left.

I lay there in the dark for a long time, wondering what to think. How odd to find myself, after five years, lying sleeplessly in another strange bed, wondering where Graham was.

Part of me would always be hurt. When I was beaten and scared, I’d waited for him to call me. I’d slept with my phone in my hand in that hospital bed. So that nobody would try to keep him from me when he finally called.

But he never did. Not once.

I wasn’t sixteen anymore, though. And the years had provided some much-needed distance from that awful time. What I hadn’t wanted to face at sixteen was the fact that my phone made outgoing calls, too. I was looped up on pain meds for a few days — not a few years. Even after they shipped me off to Vermont, I could have sat myself in one of the wicker chairs on my grandmother’s porch and called him.

I didn’t, though. Because I was scared to hear that he didn’t want me anymore.

Fuck, we were
sixteen
. We’d confided in nobody. And we were too afraid to ask for help. So I could either carry around this childhood grudge for the rest of my life, or try to set it down. Seems like a no brainer, right?

When I finally fell asleep, I was still alone in the room.

—
Graham

The following weekend we had practices only — no games. It was our lull before the storm. Regular season games were about to kick in at full force. So Bella and Hartley and I sat a long time over Saturday brunch in the Beaumont dining hall, drinking coffee and shooting the shit. Hartley’s girlfriend Corey told us a funny story about holding tryouts for an empty goalie position on the women’s team. But I was feeling almost too lazy to listen. Outside of the old arched windows, the fall leaves made a yellow carpet in the courtyard. Sometimes this place was like a freaking postcard for Ye Olde College Experience.

Like a total sap, I loved everything about it.

Eventually I got my lazy butt up to go, and Bella stood up too. “I’ll walk you out,” she said. Together, we started down the granite steps and out into the autumn day. The air had that Harkness smell — a mixture of decaying leaves and coffee beans.

Bella had a giant duffel on one shoulder and a box under her arm, so I scooped the duffel off her shoulder as we walked along.

She gave me a smile. “Aren’t you the gentleman?”

“Once in awhile. When it suits me.”

“What are you up to today?”

“I have to hit the library for a couple of hours. You?”

“Team errands. Can I pawn one off on you? It’s on your way.”

“Sure?”

She stopped and beckoned for the duffel I was carrying. Unzipping it, Bella pulled out a new
Harkness Hockey
jacket in its plastic wrapper. “Can you drop this off? It’s Rikker’s. He lives in McHerrin.”

Aw, Christ
. “We don’t know if he’s home, though,” I said. “Why don’t you give me a different errand. I don’t want to carry that around all day if he’s out.”

She pressed the jacket into my chest. “I just texted him from the dining hall, and he’s there. He even propped the outside open for me. It will take you two minutes. He’s in the first entryway on the left, third floor.”

Damn. It
. I couldn’t think of a decent reason to turn her down. “Okay.”

“You’re the best. See you at practice tonight.” She hefted her duffel again, which was now not quite so large.

She walked away without a backward glance, having no idea what she’d just asked me to do.

Even though Rikker and I had cleared the air in Boston, we weren’t pals. When I’d walked out of that hotel room after our crazy-ass conversation, I was shaking like a leaf. A few laps on foot around Boston had helped.

But I knew I couldn’t stay in that hotel room with Rikker. Talking to him had stirred up a lot of raw memories for me. I couldn’t lay there in the dark, listening to him breathe, and re-live the sound of pounding feet in that alley where we’d been attacked. “Cocksuckers!” they’d yelled. “Faggots!”

It used to be that when I closed my eyes, the voices were always right there, waiting for me. Along with the sound of their laughter. And the heavy thud of Rikker’s body hitting the ground when he’d tripped.

Once in a while I still heard that sound in my dreams.

“Get the other one!” someone had shouted. I’d switched into survival mode, and I just ran. Even after I’d gotten away, I kept running. I ran a mile in the wrong direction. When I’d stopped, the streets were unfamiliar. On shaking legs, I’d found a city bus stop. But I wasn’t that familiar with the bus system. It took me a couple of hours to get home. I was so freaked out when I finally got home that I might have broken down, telling my parents everything. But the house was empty. There was a note from my Mom on the perfectly clean kitchen counter telling me that she and my father had gone to walk around the sculpture garden.

While I’d left Rikker all alone to be beaten.

Panicked, pacing my kitchen, I’d had to run to our bathroom to throw up. I fell asleep on the bathroom floor after that. But somehow, when my parents came home, I’d gotten up and tried to act as normal as possible. Down in the basement, the game controllers sat next to each other on the sofa, right where Rikker and I had left them.

So I’d knocked them off onto the floor, then curled up in a ball and commenced hating myself. And I’d never really stopped.

Last weekend in Boston, I’d given those memories a couple more hours to churn. After pacing the streets, I walked back to the block where our team’s hotel was. But instead of going inside, I went into the hotel on the next corner. Sitting at the bar, I’d dampened those old memories with beer. (Only beer. Bella would be so proud.) Then I’d gone to the check-in desk and asked for a room. Two hundred dollars later, I walked into another hotel room. I didn’t even turn on the lights. I set my phone alarm, dropped my jeans and jacket, climbed into the bed and slept.

The next morning, I’d snuck back into the team’s hotel, and into Rikker’s room to retrieve my things. He’d been eating breakfast with the rest of my teammates.

Since then, we’d spoken only once. After the final game, we’d found ourselves standing next to each other at a fast food counter. “You okay?” he’d asked without removing his eyes from the lit menu board above our heads.

“Yeah, we’re solid,” I’d said.

That was it. Until now.

On my way up the stairs in McHerrin, I passed the rooms where Hartley and Corey had lived last year. When I got to the third floor, one of the doors was ajar. I tapped on it with my knuckles.

“Yeah!” he rasped. The familiar sound of his voice clocked me over the head like it always did, and I made myself take a deep breath before I pushed on the door.
Please be fully dressed
, I prayed as I entered.

Rikker reclined on his bed, two different textbooks open in front of him. When he glanced up, I saw him do a double take. In fact, he sat up so fast that one of the books slapped shut.

“Hey,” I said. “Bella asked me to drop this for you.”

“Thanks,” he recovered, shoving the books aside and standing up.

“Heads up.”

I tossed him the bundle, and he caught it with a grin, turning it around in his hands. Then he ripped the plastic and tore it back, exposing the wool and leather. “Nice.”

Extracting the jacket, he turned it around so that I could see the back, where RIKKER was spelled out.

“Well, put it on already,” I said. “You know you want to.”

He smiled again, because I was right. “What is it about these things, anyway? It’s just a jacket. But…”

But it was
everything
. “I dunno,” I said. “Maybe it’s that you have to bust your ass six days a week for seven months a year to own one?”

He slid one arm into the jacket. “That must be it.” He pulled it on, straightening the shoulders. He spun around once. “I’m in.”

If it were any other guy in the world, I would have said “lookin’ good,” or something like that. And he did, of course. But I didn’t trust myself. “You’re in,” I agreed.

Rikker took two steps across his tiny room to reach the little closet in the corner. From there he yanked another jacket, this one red with blue sleeves. “Funny. I thought I was in when they gave me this,” he said, showing me the Saint B's logo. “I don’t even know why I kept this thing. Probably out of spite.”

“What happened there, anyway?”
Ack
. Even as I asked, I knew it was the wrong thing to do. I should have just gotten the hell out of there. But the question had been burning a hole in my brain, and it kind of slipped out.

Rikker’s smile turned wry. “Now there’s a cautionary tale.” He shoved the Saint B's jacket back into the closet.

“You don’t have to tell me.”

With a shrug, he sat down on the edge of his bed. And when he raised those big brown eyes to mine, I couldn’t have looked away to save my life. “There was a photo of me, and I sure as hell didn’t know it had been taken.”

“A photo,” I repeated, like an idiot.

He wiggled his eyebrows. “You know, a
photo
. Anyway, during the spring term, my fuck buddy decided he wanted more than I was willing to give him. He got mad at me, and he emailed the picture to the coach. I got chucked off the team the next day.”

It was a real struggle to keep my face impassive, given all that I’d just heard. The first thought that hit me was how
ugly
that betrayal was. My second thought was:
but I hurt him worse
.

And lastly:
Rikker had a fuck buddy
. I tucked that away to think about later.